Main Menu

How to Take Your Sales to the Next Level

Before looking at ways to take your sales to the next level, it is important to consider the alternative. It is not necessary to take your sales to the next level if your sales are sufficient to keep you sustained and happy.

Changing one’s sales profile is not all puppies and roses. It can be rather disruptive, not to mention risky.

This type of change requires an outlay of new investment. Raising the needed capital for expansion can be just as hard as raising it for the initial startup.

If the timing is not spot-on, your attempts to grow can lead to the downfall of your business. Expanding to new markets brings yet more risks, especially if those new markets are in other countries.

None of this is to discourage you from trying to get to the next level. It is simply to point out that if you are happy where you are, there are equally good reasons to stay put. However, if you have been bitten by the progress bug, the only antidote is to keep moving forward and upward. Here’s how:

Understand the Failures

When it comes to increasing sales, you can learn a lot more from success than failures. A proper win loss analysis as defined by Primary Intelligence can expose the weak points in your sales process.

Win Loss Analysis teaches you how to win more by studying past sales deals. It helps you detect problems, understand the market, and stay close to the competition by listening to the best intelligence sources: your buyers and sellers.

This is not to say that there is nothing that can be learned from your successes. You need to know what worked so that you can double-down on the right things. But at the end of the day, that will only help you maintain your current level of success.

Knowing why you fail is the key to taking your sales to the next level. Perhaps it is no more complicated than your product being inferior to other competitors. You can’t fix that unless you know it. Once you discover why prospects are saying NO, you will be able to transform them into customers who say YES.

Generate Better Leads

If you want more sales from the small end of the funnel, you have to pay more attention to your lead-generation at the top of the funnel. The funnel is a metaphor for the sales process. The top of the funnel is where the process begins, in particular, lead generation.

One of the more popular ways to generate better leads is through email marketing campaigns. There is a fine line between email marketing and spam. It is important to know that difference and never cross that line. it is not just in poor taste. Spam also illegal.

A good lead is a lot more than a name and a number. It is a person who has expressed interest in your product or service and has made at least some kind of overture that they are willing to engage in a business conversation.

While that may feel like an impossibly high standard if you are coming from a telemarketing background, it is the minimum standard for an organization serious about taking things to the next level.

Good leads cost money, time and effort. They are not names picked out of a phone book. They are real relationships cultivated through email, social media, and inbound conversion optimization. These are the tools of next-level sales.

If you hope to create a successful marketing campaign, you need to put in more effort than your competitors. One overlooked approach is to create your own app and promote it to your target customers. You can use a service like Appnext to reach them. Starbucks, HSN and other big name brands use their own apps to engage with their followers in real-time.

Open New Markets

We’re not just talking about more sales. We are talking next-level sales. You can’t get there by just improving your conversion rate. At some point, you are going to have to open new markets for your product or service.

While it is not really possible to reduce opening new markets to 3 easy steps, finding the universal in your product, taking the small steps first, and utilizing the talent you already have in your organization is a good start.

You don’t have to go global to get to the next level of sales. But you do have to understand your failures, generate better leads, and find the next new market for your products and services.

Small Business Can Newsletter

Small Business Can is run by businesspeople for businesspeople. We share our experiences, successes and failures. Sign up for our insightful (and sometimes funny) newsletter and stay up to speed with all the latest insights.

About Ryan Kh

Ryan Kh is an experienced blogger, digital content & social marketer. Founder of Catalyst For Business and contributor to search giants like Yahoo Finance, MSN. He is passionate on covering topics like big data, business intelligence, startups & entrepreneurship. Follow his latest posts on Clear World Finance and Forumsmix.com.

Upcoming Events

About Small Business Can

The idea for Small Business Can comes from an Ulster Bank initiative when we went and talked to hundreds of businesspeople and asked them about the types of business supports they most valued. The majority said that they valued the insights of other businesspeople the most. We came up with smallbusinesscan.com, a site run by businesspeople for businesspeople. Read more...